Self-Portraits of the South: An Interview with Suzanne Hudson https://ift.tt/RLprum1
I met Suzanne Hudson through editor, creator, and publisher of WELL READ Magazine, Mandy Haynes, who let me go hog wild writing four pieces about the late author, William Gay. Hudson was a close friend of Gay’s and in 2023 edited The Best of the Shortest: A Southern Writers Reading Reunion (Livingston Press) along with her husband and author, Joe Formichella, and Mandy Haynes. The image of Gay’s painting, The Harrikin, was used on the back of the anthology, and I was privileged to write an introduction to his painting. Later, Hudson invited me to Fairhope, Alabama, to attend the Southern Writers Reading Reunion, which honored the events that took place between 1998 and 2008. Hudson described the honorees as an “antiestablishment strain of the literary family” … with “no academic airs, mercenary social climbing, or obsequious ass-kissing.” That pretty much sums up Hudson’s take on what the Southern writing scene should be.
Hudson was recently awarded the 2025 Alabama Truman Capote Prize for Short Fiction. You might think someone on Hudson’s level wouldn’t have the time or inclination to support less established writers, but that’s simply not the case. She and her husband are incredibly supportive of my writing and very active in the Southern writing scene supporting others. I hope, with this interview about her latest collection, Deep Water, Dark Horizons, & other stories, plus, I can pay it forward in a small way.
Suzanne Hudson is the international prize-winning author of three novels, including In a Temple of Trees and In the Dark of the Moon; a “fictional-ish memoir,” Shoe Burnin’ Season: A Womanifesto; and two collections of short stories, Opposable Thumbs (a John Gardner Fiction Book Award finalist) and All the Way to Memphis. Hudson has been named the 2025 state of Alabama recipient of the Truman Capote Prize for excellence in short fiction writing. She lives near Fairhope, Alabama, at Waterhole Branch Productions, with her husband, author Joe Formichella.
The collection is Hudson’s best of the best, so to speak—short stories, essays, and excerpts from Hudson’s novels. Her writing is fierce, raw, ironic, hyperbolic, unapologetic, and hysterically funny. Her characters are pistol wielding, tobacco spitting, honky tonkin’ drunks, hussies, racists, and murderers, but nonetheless they somehow remain loveable (well, many of them, at least). Hudson’s characters, settings, and plots are in every way a self-portrait of the South, a topic, for better or worse, that Hudson knows in spades.
Let’s discuss dark writing. Without a doubt, you tap into humanity’s dark side, albeit with a lot of dark humor. In your essay “Writing the Mud Life,” you talk about how readers might perceive your writing as pessimistic, even vengeful. Would you like to dispel or respond to what some might consider the “dark side” of your writing?
I’ve always been drawn to the darkness, because life ain’t a Hallmark card, and sappy sentimentality tends to trigger my gag reflex. But I understand escapism, totally. I regularly record a soap opera to watch when I just want to tune out and be entertained. As far as pessimism and revenge go, I admit that, along with redemption of the historical sins of southern past, I have a few personal scores to settle. It’s really cathartic to be able to purge that pus. And to ignore that history, as so many are wont to do these days, only makes that boil grow larger and angrier.
DYou paint a vivid canvas of dysfunctional families—children at the mercy of their stepparents and/or parents who turn a blind eye to abuse. How do you navigate the internal world of these child characters without jumping off a cliff?
I have a pretty dysfunctional family tree, grew up in a blandly dysfunctional family—nothing really jarring or violent. So, when I write about sex abuse or physical violence, that is born of imagination and empathy, both of which come from loving reading from a very early age. How anyone can be a voracious reader and not come away with love and acceptance is beyond me. Also, part of my career was as a guidance counselor, so I was privy to some really disturbing and tragic experiences from the lives of adolescents. Maybe my ability to detach and draw on objectivity in those circumstances allows me to dig into the internal weeds of my child characters, without “jumping off a cliff”?
When your female characters reach their breaking point—Maggie from “Bonita Street Bridge Club,” Clista from “All the Way to Memphis,” the little girl patiently waiting for retribution in “The Thing with Feathers”—their façade shatters and their true selves emerge.What attracts you to writing about facades? And what do these stories say about your male antagonists?
Doesn’t everyone have multiple personas to fit any given situation, vocation, or relationship? Except for those few—or that one—relationship that are/is the closest, when vulnerability is safer than usual? And, yes, I have some really harsh male protagonists—but some equally unredeemable female ones as well. An equal opportunity exploiter, I guess.
First, I want to preface the connections I make between your writing and Flannery O’Connor’s by emphasizing that you are certainly by no means a tribute act to O’Connor, and that that you undeniably stand on your own merit, but there are unavoidable comparisons. For instance, O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” and your short story, “See Ruby Falls,” are both road trips from hell. You fill your car with whiny children, the vile and insufferable, Marble, who constantly jabs at her brother-in-law and mama’s boy, Eustace Bland, Grandmother Helen who conjures up O’Connor’s nostalgic (and annoying) grandmother character.However, what occurs in O’Connor’s story which I found to be quite different than yours is the early introduction of the Misfit character. He’s Chekhov’s gun; you know that O’Connor’s characters are going to have a run in with him, whereas in your story it could go either way. Do you view Eustace as a pseudo-Misfit character?
I never connected Eustace with the Misfit, but I like that comparison. Of course, the main similarity is that they cause death—the Misfit very actively, but Eustace passively. And Eustace has done the reader a favor by letting Marble die, hasn’t he? By the same token, Grandmother Helen is much more benign, as an annoyance, than O’Connor’s grandmother character in “Good Man.” I’m a Flannery devotee, down to my Georgia roots, so the comparison is very flattering.
One more O’Connor comparison and I’ll stop. Mrs. Wilson’s gaudy Mardi Gras dress in “The Seamstress” acts as a similar symbol to O’Connor’s infamous hat in “Everything That Rises Must Converge.”Will you talk about what the dress represents? And continuing on the subject of “The Seamstress,” What caused you to implement fairy tale tropes in this story?
I didn’t consciously think of what the Mardi Gras dress might represent, but it is garish and show-offy, just like the character who wears it—and ultimately is humiliated in it, thanks to the seamstress. Same thing for fairy tale tropes, which I only think of now that you mention it. My writing process is not to overthink, just regurgitate. And once that puke is on the page, I rake through it repeatedly, adding layers, subtracting overkill (even though at least one critic accused me of “overwriting”) and tightening it up.
For lack of a better word your characters experience epiphanies, but unlike James Joyce’s epiphanies, I think you liberate your characters.Would you agree with that statement…that you liberate them?
Ha—Yes, I think “liberation” is a better descriptor for my characters, as they break free from other people or circumstances that have kept them in a bad place. Little epiphanies here and there, sure, but for some of them it’s a matter of survival. How far would anyone go to survive?
The title story, “Deep Water, Dark Horizons,” is a story within a story within a story—honestly, that could be said of a lot of your stories—where you juxtapose the 2010 Deep Water Horizon Spill in the Gulf of Mexico (I’m sticking with “Mexico” here) to an ancient malfunctioning septic tank. There’s a sense of hilarity here but of course there’s nothing funny about the devastating consequences from the Gulf Spill.Will you expand on your metaphorical septic tank and how authors can use their voice and humor as an agent of protest?
That story is one of my most personal ones, as my middle younger brother (of three) died of acute myeloid leukemia (AML) only months after being repeatedly exposed to the dispersant sprayed over the water, blowing in from the Gulf of, yes, Mexico onto the beaches where he and the other workers were cleaning. I also had lost one of my very best and longest known friends—and next door neighbor—because mental illness caused him to alienate those closest to him. And he really did have an environmentally fouling septic tank in his back yard above the creek. Finally, I was recovering from a few years of what I now recognize as an abusive relationship—with a lying, conniving business associate and grifter who really played me—to my utter embarrassment. So, I was working through some very real grief and pulling from some real-life emotional trauma—with a whole hell of a lot of revenge, served up good and cold. I got to murder BP symbolically, by murdering that damned “business associate” by proxy, which I thoroughly enjoyed. Of course, as we all know, you gotta laugh. I felt I should lighten up the darkness a shade or two. Humor gets us through the worst of times, no?
Yes, you write literature, but in my humble opinion, you’ve crossed over into horror. After reading the title story, DWDH, I thought this is eco-horror. And when I read the ending of “Yes, Ginny,” there was a hint of speculative fiction. Am I making this up that the chair was a portal to hell?! The imagery at the ending of that story made me draw that conclusion, personally.Finally, the stories “LaPadre” and “The Thing with Feathers” could be viewed as psychological horror and/or body horror. Have you ever considered yourself to be an author of horror or does that just go hand in hand with writing in the Southern Gothic genre and writing about grotesque characters?
I love that the chair could be a portal to hell—and that ending was intended to let the reader fill in the blank. And yes, I do think that gothic, grotesque, and horror are close literary cousins—maybe even siblings.
Go-to books? What do you find yourself returning to over and over? Or what authors do you find yourself repeatedly returning to?
I’m a strange reader. I get on a jag—like a true crime phase, or a southern gothic phase, or something really shallow and formulaic. Most of my “returning to” years were back during my 30s and 40s—returning to classics, mostly 19th and 20th century. And growing up I devoured books, practically lived at the public library every day after school. Now I enjoy reading authors I knew/know personally and really respect—like the late William Gay and Brad Watson. And Joe Formichella in particular, of course. I’ve been on a little poetry reading jaunt lately, unusual for me and wonderful, with Jim and Tina Braziel’s Glass Cabin and Jackie Trimble’s How to Survive the Apocalypse. Loving both books.
What’s on your agenda? New novels, collections?
Joe and I have kicked around a few ideas for offbeat co-writing projects. I might have one more novel in me and will always pick at short stories—in my head, at least. The occasional essay, especially in these strange times. Currently I have a couple of editing projects in the works, with co-editors seeking a home for them. More to come on that . . .
Congratulations on winning the Alabama Truman Capote Award for Short Fiction. You’ve undoubtedly made your stamp on Southern writing. It means a lot to me to get the chance to interview you and I am truly excited to read your next book.
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